Note that illegal immigrants are a net benefit to the Social Security fund as they pay in but can’t take out with fake SS#.
Detailed critique of CIS “research” from the CATO institute, which is libertarian not liberal.
http://www.cato.org/blog/center-immigration-studies-exaggerates-immigrant-welfare-use
And:
http://www.citylab.com/work/2015/09/are-half-of-americas-immigrants-really-on-welfare/403657/
Norasteh has four main critiques with the CIS methodology:
Over-counting. The center measures welfare use in terms of households, not individuals. That puts immigrants at a disadvantage, since they generally have larger families than native-born Americans, and also fails to control for native-born members living with immigrant relatives.
Bad comparison. CIS compares welfare usage rates for immigrant households to all native-born households—including wealthy ones that don’t need state benefits. Cato found that poor immigrants used welfare at a lower rate than poor native-born Americans.
Flawed measure. CIS counts welfare usage rate by including any household where a member used Medicaid, or food, housing, or cash subsidies during 2012. What it doesn’t measure is the cash value of benefits actually consumed.
Missing context. CIS also fails to include an analysis of how immigrants use Medicare and social security—two significant public benefit programs. Research suggests that immigrants actually contribute much more to these programs than they consume from it.
Many foreign professionals do not work for less than Americans at all, they may be paid even more to lure them in.
But besides the point, the current focus is beyond overloading the system, the main point is terror and safety. Why illegals who are criminals are able to get in over and over and over. They do not belong in the USA. No companies are interested in them, not big, not small, these people have no intentions on working, they only intend to be engaged in criminal activities.
@riverbirch, the number of illegal immigrants in this country has gone down since the Great Recession. Do you realize that?
And all this discussion is about the benefits that illegal immigrants consume, but immigrants of all types also create and innovate. They also create babies who grow up and work (and innovate) in the US, which is very important for welfare states like the US and the rest of the West, because the biggest wealth transfer is from working age adults to non-productive seniors, many of whom are still reliant on the government to get by. Compared to that, spending on school lunches is nothing.
Now that Germany has announced it will take 800,000 and dedicate $billions to the cause, I don’t see how they can prevent all 4 million of the projected immigrants from showing up on their doorstep. How will they turn them away?
Actually, @MiamiDAP many H1-B visa holders DO get paid less than their American counterparts. And they have far less job security.
Illegals who are criminals are able to get into the US the same way that American criminals get into Europe: you can’t track every single person.
Context…immigrants pay in into the system, they don’t just take out.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122714/immigrants-dont-drain-welfare-they-fund-it
^If US citizens had those jobs, the tax pay-in would be the same, and there would be fewer US citizens collecting public benefits. Win-win.
@Bay,
Win-win only if there are workers willing to DO those jobs.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-u-s-farms-fewer-hands-for-the-harvest-1439371802
The thing about the argument about jobs American citizens aren’t willing to do is that it’s missing the rest of the sentence. “Jobs American citizens aren’t willing to do AT THAT RATE OF PAY.” So either employers raise pay or use technology to decrease the number of workers needed. Participating in the ethnic cleansing done by the governments of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, etc. on the backs of American workers isn’t the appropriate answer.
@zoosermom The jobs listed in the WSJ article I linked pay up to $17 per hour. The subhead on this article, (please note not published in a news source considered in any way liberal) is
“Producers raise wages, enhance benefits, but a worker shortage grows with tighter border”
So raise the wages more. It really is that simple. The WSJ is very much part of the open borders lobby, but I’m not of the attacking source school generally because as I said earlier, it’s what some sources choose to leave out that is the most important.
OK – so let’s shift the talk back to Europe.
Why do you think we have a lesser problem with Muslim assimilation in the US? Or do we? Is it simply that, proportionally, there are fewer Muslims here? Or are we (as some of us like to think) a bit more open minded to “the other”?
(Waving my hand in a circular motion.)
Discuss amongst yourselves.
@zoosermom, if pay is raised, stuff costs more.
There are folks willing to pay a premium, but so far, not many seem to be willing to pay more for vegetables grown with American labor.
@katliamom, the US does a better job of integrating immigrants and providing opportunities for young people. Also, most of our Arab population is Christian and most of our Muslim population isn’t Arab.
BTW, I wonder how many people here know their Anerican history. The Mexican immigration to the US is almost identical to the Italian immigration to the US a century ago. A very Catholic low-education mostly manual-labor workforce. 5M Italians came to a country of about 90M. 12M Mexican immigrants now in a country of 320M.
The Italians brought their lovely little criminal organizarions as well.
So in half a century, expect a movie trilogy that romanticizes the Zetas to sweep the Oscars.
I can’t help thinking of the waves of Italian and Irish immigrants too. At the scale of immigration, they were not wanted, they were discriminated against, and they were used as cannon fodder (the Irish at least) during the Civil War. Maybe it’s because we are a nation of immigrants that we can absorb these waves better. It certainly isn’t pretty when it happens though.
Yep, the Irish fit that description as well. About 2M destitute, starving, mostly illiterate Irish came over to a country that was expanding from 20M to 30M between the potato famine and the Civil War.
And when they got here, the Irish formed criminal gangs. Gangs of New York is about those mostly Irish gangs thieving, fighting, killing, and disturbing the peace in Old New York.
So in 150 years, expect the DiCaprio of the 22nd century to gallivant prettily through a movie set of LA circa 2000 in a film about Mexican gangs. Maybe they’ll mix up history and have Trump lead the nativist gang.
There are huge differences between the immigration of a hundred years ago and now. Those people came legally. They could not get welfare or any taxpayer supplied benefits because there weren’t any.
My ancestors came legally. They knew they had to bring money. They knew they had to know English. They knew they had to assimilate.
@TatinG, to the native-born Americans in big cities like Chicago where the langauge on the street in most neighborhoods was not English, the immigrants certainly didn’t seem like they were assimilating.
In the late 19th century, the German language New Yorker Staats-Zeitung had a circulation comparable to the New York Times and New York Tribune.
I do think that too many people are ignorant of their country’s history.
BTW, language usage by Hispanic immigrants follows the same pattern as earlier immigrants. By the 2nd generation, more of them speak mainly in English. By the 3rd generation, English usage is dominant.
The current immigration from Mexico and Central America is not like the Italian immigration of generations past or even the Mexican immigration of recent years. I know that because I have worked with such immigrants for more than 25 years and the demographic has completely changed over that time. I choose to offer a helping hand to them, but I also choose not to live in fantasy land, and I will not stay silent while those countries’ elites ethnically cleanse their own undesirables and destroy families, cultures and communities. But I can tell you that there is one thing Donald Trump,is right about. Those countries are very eager to encourage their criminals to immigrate. And they do.